On May 16, 2006, at 6:20 PM, Simon Burge wrote:
> ]The "packed" was added back in '99 with the commit message:
>
> Add the `packed' attribute to structures which describe wire
> protocol data.
The idea is that it also is supposed to disable things like mandatory
8-byte structure alignment in some ABIs.
That said, it's not clear to me that adding __packed__ to all those
structures was the best idea in the world, because it can (and often
does) make the code to access them much less efficient.
-- thorpej